It is hard to believe the village was built from
scratch. It looks as if it has always been here. Tidy
kitchen gardens sit next to thatched mud houses
raised on to plinths. Banana trees and betel
nut palms line the paths; chickens, goats and
children muck around in the dust. Cows munch
steadily, tied to stakes. Green rice seedlings stand
in the fields.

Just three years ago all this was a sodden pile
of mud and ruined homes, after Cyclone Aila
blew into Bangladesh on 25 May 2009.
‘We heard [neighbouring] Gabura was drowned, destroyed,’ says Nasima Ali, who lives
in Mirgunj, a village on the southwestern edge
of the Bay of Bengal. ‘We had 10 minutes to
warn people before it hit. Suddenly we were up
to our noses in water.’

Villagers are fighting a three-pronged
attack from floods, waterlogging
and saltwater.

Hazel Healy

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The tidal surge that came with Cyclone
Aila reached six metres, bursting through the
embankments they thought would protect
them. Across the coast, 190 people died, and
hundreds of thousands of livestock drowned.

Mud houses crumbled into the water. The
villagers recall taking shelter on the few brick buildings left standing. They all use the same
sweeping motion with their hands when they
say the word ‘Aila’.

‘We lost everything – all our belongings,
money, documents, animals.’

‘Even the meal I was cooking,’ a woman adds.

Warming, rising seas are predicted to
increase both the frequency and intensity
of tropical cyclones, but these villagers are
determined not to leave. I travelled to this
remote corner of Bangladesh to find out what
they, and millions of others, are doing to adapt
to the impacts of a changing climate.

Ground Zero

Adaptation has long shaken off its early
reputation as the dirty, defeatist side of climate
science. We have known for over a decade that
the least responsible for global warming are
first in line to feel the full force of its impact.
During that time, carbon emissions have risen
faster than we imagined, and are rising still
faster by the day.

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Even if we stopped producing CO2
tomorrow, we’re still likely to hit a catastrophic
two degrees Celsius rise in temperature – by which time, floods in Bangladesh will cover,
on average, 30 per cent more land. This bleak
outlook means that any push to cut emissions
must now come hand in hand with efforts to
help the poorest cope.

Bangladesh, with its paltry carbon footprint
of 0.3 tonnes per person, is a case in point. It’s
often described as the ground zero of climate
change. Flat, populous and poor, it’s home to
160 million people squeezed into a country half
the size of Iowa. Needless to say, its problems
did not begin with global warming. Slap bang
in the middle of Asia’s largest river delta, three
mighty rivers – the Ganges, Brahmaputra and
the Meghna – surge through it into the Indian
Ocean, splitting into hundreds of tributaries
along the way. Studying a map of the country I
will spend two weeks exploring, it looks as if a
toddler has been let loose with a blue pen. This
tangle of rivers burst their banks every monsoon
– in a good year, a fifth of the country is flooded.

‘We had 10 minutes to warn people
before the cyclone hit. Suddenly we
were up to our noses in water’

Human interventions have made matters
worse. Indian dams have disrupted fresh water
flows, allowing saline tides to penetrate further
inland. Embankments planned to protect
farmland have ended up waterlogging large
areas, by blocking drainage.

Enter climate change: melting Himalayan
glaciers to the north, rising seas to the south. Even under the most benign
scenarios, rising sea levels are likely to displace tens of millions from the coastal regions.

A community’s vulnerability is not just an
accident of geography, but also depends upon
its access to resources. While Bangladesh has
made important inroads in reducing poverty
and cutting population growth, a third of its
people are malnourished and 40 per cent still
live below the poverty line.

But there is flipside to this coin. Bangladeshis
are adept at living with water and have adapted
to environmental changes over centuries.
So when it comes to climate adaptation, the
country is described admiringly as a laboratory
of innovation. Development workers and
policymakers travel here to learn about resilience,
and how vulnerable communities have learned to
cope with uncertainty. Bangladesh, they will tell
you, is ahead of the game.

Adaptation in action

A constant, industrious stream of humanity
lines the road south from Dhaka. Tricycles
stacked with everything from tree trunks
to baskets of broiler chickens compete with
brightly painted road-hogging trucks and
kamikaze buses.

Along the roadside, women spread out
boiled rice to dry, men squat by scales offering
live fish for sale. A boy floats a baby sibling on a
raft in the family’s freshwater pond. Other girls
and boys carry mud out of fields in baskets, or
gather firewood. During the six-hour journey
there is no break from people or activity, in this
the seventh most densely populated nation in
the world.

By the time we arrive in Mitradanga it
is late afternoon. The sun is beginning to
dip over bamboo trellises that trail ripening
squash over a mass of water hyacinth. Birds fly
low over the surface of the water, black against
a peach-pink sky.

It’s a dreamy scene, and I say as much to Shova
Biswas, vice-president of the Sonalir Shopnaw (or
Golden Dream) forum, who has emerged to greet
us. ‘You should see it in the rainy season,’ she says
flatly. I have come to the village during the two
months of the year when land can be farmed and
water is temporarily at bay.

The village sticks out on a thin raised finger
of land surrounded by water, close to the
Modhumoti river. Located on the intertidal
floodplains of south-central Bangladesh in
Gopalganj district, it’s facing a three-pronged
attack from water-logging, floods and saltwater
intrusion.

Shova picks out some of Mitradanga’s
defences from our surroundings. The mudcaked
men are climbing up out of paddy fields
sown with indigenous deep-water and saline-resistant
rice varieties; the ducks waddling into
their coops are prodigious layers, whose eggs
provide both nutrition and an income to plug the gap left by lower-yielding rice.

Houses and water pumps are mounted on to
plinths built high enough to withstand floods
for the next 30 years. Alongside them stand
huge tanks to harvest salt-free, safe to drink
rainwater from the skies.

Shova shows us the floating gardens – a
strengthened version of traditional models.
They are planted with new crops, such as
turmeric intercropped with okra, cucumber
and chillies.

From bad to worse

These technologies are courtesy of an
adaptation research project. Mitradanga was
selected because, while its problems pre-date
climate change, heavier rains and sea-level rise
will make things go from bad to worse. Funded
by British charity Christian Aid, it’s delivered
by a national NGO, the Christian Commission
for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB). ‘The
idea is,’ says Evan Sarkar, project co-ordinator
and charismatic Baptist, ‘that when the next
crisis hits, they will be ready.’

The village is home to an imposing – if
dilapidated – government flood shelter, whose
path is eroded clean away. It offers shelter to
people, but cannot safeguard their animals or
homes, which are often swept away in severe
monsoon floods.

To help people recover after these
catastrophes – the village also caught the
tail end of cyclone Sidr in 2007 – CCDB has
helped the poorest women in the village set up
a savings and loans scheme, which has already
banked $1,000.

Saline water
rots the rice
in the paddy
fields. Fish in
the surrounding
rivers grow
ulcers and die

Villagers have used the money to stock back up
on skinny biscuit-coloured cows with black-lined
eyes – docile, adaptable creatures that can swim.

Funds, flood protection, livelihood options:
it sounds like a lot. But when the Golden
Dream forum gather in a corrugated shed (the
designated ‘climate adaptation centre’) to talk
about the problems they face, I begin to realize
why it may not be enough.

‘Seawater has come into our area,’ says
Subhash Chandra Roy, a retired teacher. Rice
rots in the paddy fields; pumpkin production
has dropped dramatically. Fish in the
surrounding rivers grow ulcers and die.

Most people here are subsistence farmers.
They complain that the seasons have dropped
back from six to three. The weather behaves
strangely – erratic rains and unexpected cold
spells ruin seedlings, while deep fog infects crops
with aphids and damages the mango trees.

‘Our harvests are shrinking’

One woman, Champa, her teeth stained red
with betel nut juice, complains of scabies
outbreaks caused by the stagnant water. During
the dry season, the drinking water is salty and
harmful. Each flood brings a sanitation crisis, and acute water-borne diseases that have claimed lives here.

The future holds only worries about how the
land will sustain their children – as well as how
to feed them in the meantime.

Posters on the wall warn of the greenhouse
effect, and everyone nods knowingly when
it is mentioned. ‘We are facing a lot of crises
because of people in the West,’ says Shova. ‘Our
harvests are shrinking.’ This slow erosion of
livelihoods doesn’t make the headlines, but it’s
no less devastating for that.

‘But how can we expect Europeans to believe
this?’ she asks. ‘They don’t cultivate rice in
paddies, they don’t raise cows. They live in big
buildings surrounded by industry. How could
they understand?’

She’s right. It’s hard for us to remember a
life – and to imagine a destiny – tied so tightly
to the land. In Britain climate change translates
into hose-pipe bans, warmer weather or high
insurance premiums in places like Yorkshire.

Women's groups in Mitradanga are giving out community loans to help farmers stock back up on income generating assets like cows.

Hazel Healy

All here agree that the support, though
helpful, does not go far enough.

The villagers have a solution. ‘Stop air
pollution and give us financial help to survive
this,’ they say. It resonates with UN climate
negotiations: stop damaging, pay for the damage.

Shova has another suggestion: ‘Take us to
your country if it gets bad here.’ Evan Sarkar
prefers Canada: ‘They’ve got more space.’

The project in Mitradanga is in its early
stages, with methods being trialled and
evaluated. ‘When we started, people said
this is too big, it’s a global problem,’ says
Dwijen Malik of the Bangladesh Centre of
Advanced Studies, which is lending technical
support. ‘But now they are the doers in their
communities; there’s a good feeling here
compared to three years ago. Our biggest
challenge is finding a way to boost agricultural
production.’

Later I visit the Centre for Environmental
and Geographical Information Services
(CEGIS) in Dhaka, which specializes in water
management and modelling. Fida Khan,
head of climate change research, shows me an
animated graphic that projects the impacts of
sea-level rise. I watch as Gopalganj is slowly
engulfed by a red splurge of salinity.

I wonder if all the ducks in the world would
be any match for this hazard.

The same challenge faces much of the
country, whose land is intensely farmed. Crop
production is predicted to decrease by up to 32
per cent by 2050, by which time there will be
an extra 130 million mouths to feed.

On the water’s edge

To meet the people who are facing a somewhat
different, and more acute, set of problems, I
travel further southwest, out on the edge of the
Bay of Bengal in the shelter of the world’s last great mangrove forest – the Sundarbans.

As I head closer to the Indian Ocean, the
lush paddies give way to a more barren, waterlogged
landscape and ragged trees. This is the
mark of shrimp aquaculture. In response to
growing salinity, some landowners have turned
to prawns. But while it has made fortunes for
a small number of exporters, shrimp farming
employs a fraction of the day labourers who once
worked the land, which is usually leased by force
from peasant farmers. The brackish water from
the shrimp ponds wrecks the local environment,
killing trees and spreading salinity.

Shahriar Dider and Anny Parveen, a
warm husband and wife team from local
NGO Shushilan, come out to greet me
from an enormous gaudy guesthouse-cum-cyclone
shelter in Munshiganj. We set off on
motorbikes, bumping off down a narrow raised
road along a canal.

Along the way, we stop off to speak to
a group of farmers – who are in a meeting
choosing volunteers for a disaster preparedness
course. Their area is always among the first
to disappear under a blue wash in maps that
predict sea-level rise. This land could be
underwater in the next 40 years.

Some villagers have already left, tired of
trying to eke out crops from the salt-poisoned
soil and fearful of natural disasters.

The group puts forward a long wishlist of
what they need to happen in order to stay in the
land of their ancestors. Most importantly, they
say, the government must fix and then raise
the coastal embankments, and build thousands
more cyclone shelters.

‘We want ways to carry on making a living
here,’ adds Selina Said, a mother of two.
‘We need new ideas and different kinds of
technology.’

Their village is equipped with a similar
array of adaptation techniques as Mitradanga.
They are fattening crabs and growing chillies,
to make up for lost rice yields; using organic
compost to nourish the exhausted salty land.

What nobody knows is whether any of
this will be enough. ‘How will the future
generations live? What disasters are lying in wait
for my children?’ asks Selina.

Hardcore poor

The trill of frogs grows louder as we motor
on to the edge of the Sundarbans mangrove
forest. Hugely rich in biodiversity, it’s the last
stronghold of the Royal Bengal tiger. They are
on track to join the Arctic polar bears as early
victims of climate-induced habitat loss in the
next 50 to 90 years.

The Sundarbans also acts as a buffer against
storms and sustains around two million
Bangladeshis. The people who materialize
to greet us on the forest edge are landless,
described as ‘hardcore poor’ by Anny.
They subsist entirely on the forest, foraging
honey, wood, shrimp fry and crabs from its
meandering swampy channels.

But to collect these they have to journey ever
deeper into tiger territory. They call the tiger
babu (uncle) as a mark of respect – and fear.
Among the group is a woman whose 25-yearold
son was killed by a tiger. They reel off
others – an uncle, brother-in-law, father-in-law.

Since Cyclone Aila swept away everything
they owned – their boats, clothes and cattle –
they have not been able to recover. Nearly three
years later, they are living hand to mouth.

Shahriar Dider from Shushilan is testing saline tolerant vegetable varieties on the coast.

Hazel Healy

‘If we earn something from the forest, then
we eat. If not, no,’ says one woman, Jhori Dashi.

If another disaster comes, or the sea
continues to submerge the Sundarbans that
feeds them, this ragged group of people will be
forced into total destitution.

The following day, Shahriar takes me on
a tour of the demonstration farm, where he’s
trying out salt-tolerant vegetables. There’s a
mangrove nursery for re-foresting roadside
embankments. Four sea geese waddle past.
Anny looks at them ambivalently.

‘We’re trying to find ways to help people
here, but it’s a big challenge,’ says Anny. ‘Donor
money may not last forever.’

‘Bangladeshi people are always facing trouble.
They always take the initiative to pick themselves
up. But with these cyclones, people are getting
more and more vulnerable,’ says Shahriar.

Schools that float

Shahriar and Anny’s dilemmas are shared by
development agencies across the country.

Major international organizations made the
switch to ‘resilience’ from disaster management
some years ago. CARE , Plan, Red Cross,
Practical Action, Oxfam, Christian Aid,
Action Aid and WWF all have ‘climate smart’
frameworks, and all are active in Bangladesh.

Practical Action has built multipurpose
flood shelters in the north that lend full-scale
protection to livestock and people, and have had huge successes growing pumpkins on sandbars;
the United Nations Development Programme
is trialing disaster-proof villages, ringed entirely
by dykes, with houses mounted on concrete
legs. Environmental challenges also drive
great innovation in national NGOs. Shidhulai
Swanirvar Sangstha has built a fleet of floating,
solar-powered schools. Another outfit sails
along the coast offering hospital services.

Ahead of the game

Bangladesh is awash with climate adaptation
projects. But I am left wondering: what makes
for success? And how do you know when you
see it? In the capital Dhaka, I track down
Bangladeshi scientist Saleemul Huq, leading
climate adaptation expert, and author for the
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IP CC).

‘There’s no static one-time solution to the
problem,’ he says, ‘but a project must first take
long-term climate impacts into account in
design. The proof will only be seen 10 years
from now.’

The theory is, of course, that if you are well
prepared you will suffer less. ‘In many ways
Bangladesh is better adapted than even the
US,’ he says. ‘Take Hurricane Katrina. That’s a technologically advanced and rich country
watching the thing coming but not being able
to protect its own citizens – particularly the
poorer citizens.

Farmers have channelled sediment from the river to raise the level of their land by up to five metres.

‘I’ve been working on adaptation for the last
10 years in the Least Developed Countries of
Africa and Asia, and Bangladesh is several steps
ahead of anybody else.’

Bangladesh has certainly played its hand
well on the international stage. Politicians have
eloquently challenged Western nations to open
up their borders to refugees. They write hardhitting
op-eds in leading broadsheets and lay
responsibility squarely at the feet of polluting
nations. And they are at the front of the queue
when it comes to adaptation funding.

Only, until now, very little has materialized
– $18 million to be precise. Most of the money
coughed up by industrialized nations has
gone to large economies like China and India
to finance ‘mitigation’ in the form of energy
efficiency (translation: slightly less polluting
coal-fired power stations than before). Small
island states, such as Tuvalu and other low-lying
atolls in the Pacific, received, along with the
Least Developed Countries in Asia, a sum total
of $35 million from dedicated climate funds
between 2004 and 2011.

Show me the money

Rachel Berger, climate change adviser at
Practical Action, sits on the board of the
Adaptation Fund, which was set up under
the Kyoto Protocol. She worries that Western
countries will claw back more than they give
via their contractors, through tied aid. ‘The
problem then is that adaptation priorities will
be set according to what will benefit the private sector, not the poorest.’

The fight is on to have the UN manage
the funds, to keep administration costs down,
and to block the World Bank’s top-down
programmes that ignore local needs and
knowledge.

The West has come up with just $2.4 billion of the $30 billion promised by 2013

Meanwhile, UN climate talks have set a
$100 billion annual target for a Green Climate
Fund – for mitigation and adaptation – by
2020. This is roughly the same as the entire
global development budget. There is a lot to
play for, even if the West has only come up with
$2.4 billion of $30 billion promised by 2013.

The unreliable track record of developed
nations has led some Bangladeshis to think they
had best not count on it.

Climate finance is a trap

‘This money won’t come,’ says activist Rezaul
Chowdury. ‘Even when their economies were
good, they didn’t give it. We will have to rely
on our social capital: participation, sacrifice and
leadership.’

We are in his dusty Dhaka office. Stickers
saying ‘Ecological reparations now!’ decorate
his laptop.

Indigenous solutions: Farmers have raised the level of these paddy fields in Bilzaitua, southwestern Bangladesh by channeling sediment-laden river water on to their land.

Hazel Healy

Rezaul runs COAST, a radical microfinance
organization for coastal peoples and a climate
justice coalition called Equitybd. He lost his
home on Kutubdia island to erosion – and close
family in the devastating 1991 cyclone, which
killed over 138,000 people. This history lends
his campaigning a passionate edge.

He is a late convert to adaptation (‘In the
beginning I was so against it’) but is clear about
its limits. ‘For me mitigation has got to be first.
My government failed in Durban by saying “We
need money!”’

There are others who believe climate finance
is a trap. ‘It’s like a bribe from a man who is
caught having an affair,’ says Iftekhar Mahmud,
environmental reporter at leading Bangla daily
Prothom Alo. ‘He keeps his wife sweet, giving
her jewellery, a cruise trip, to keep on with his
mistress. This Green Climate Fund is a bribe,
to let them carry on doing their dirty work – to
carry on emitting.’

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it

If the buck stops with Bangladesh, what
chances does the government have of protecting
the most vulnerable? Some trends bode
well. Bangladesh has cut deaths from natural
disasters, with cyclone shelters and early
warning systems, and invested in agricultural
research.

The ruling Awami League even has
something akin to a cross-party agreement with
their arch-rivals in opposition when it comes to
climate change policy.

Bangladesh was the first developing country
to complete a National Strategy and Action
Plan, and they have ring-fenced $100 million
a year from their national budget to fulfil it.
Pledges are rolling in for a ‘resilience fund’
from foreign donors, but money will fall far
short of the $6 billion the government says it
needs for more cylcone shelters and repairs to
7,000 kilometres of coastal dykes built back in
the 1960s.

Technical capacity is also in short supply,
and there is a yawning gulf between policy
and implementation. Bangladesh ranks close
to the bottom of Transparency International’s
corruption index.

'We can't stop them living their luxury lives. But at least give us the money to adapt'

Money earmarked for flood defence measures in Khulna’s Dacope district has never
materialized; some embankments were never
built, others are not as high or robust as their
blueprints prescribed.

NGO workers are deeply cynical and
outspoken about mis-allocations. They talk
of new organizations ‘grown overnight’ or
‘signpost NGOs’ who receive funding. The
Environment and Forests Minister Hassan
Mahmud came under fire for directing funds
exclusively to groups in the Chittagong Hills,
his constituency, which faces no threat from
rising seas. He considered using climate
funds to import hippos, after witnessing their
tourism draw on a visit to Africa. Bangladeshi
media caught wind of both these scandals and
hippo cartoons dominated the press for weeks.
But while the media ran Mahmud through
the mill, he was promoted to a more senior
position by his party.

I get the chance to meet staff from the
government’s Climate Cell unit towards the
end of my visit. The 10-year climate strategy is
not sequenced, or prioritized. Projects have a
maximum two-year lifespan.

But the rhetoric is fierce. ‘We can’t make
countries reduce their carbon,’ says a woman
from the forestry department. ‘We can’t stop
them living their luxury lives and destroying our
world. But at least give us the money to adapt.’
Mindful of criticism, the government has
outsourced the next round of public funding
for NGO adaptation projects to a microcredit
organization.

Setting fire to a house

These are all steps in the right direction.
And besides, there is something crass about tut-tutting over the capacity of a 40-year old
country like Bangladesh to cope with an
ecological crisis caused by the West; especially
when the very same industrial prowess whose
incubation is degrading Bangladesh’s habitat is
what has equipped us to cope better with the
impacts of global warming.

It’s a bit like setting fire to someone’s house,
and then standing on your state of the art fire
engine to watch, criticizing, as they try to put it
out with buckets of water.

This point is not lost on Iftekhar Mahmud:
‘Environmental degradation is part of the
development process. Now you have a good
economy, law and order, and you spread
pollution all over the world. We know we need
to deal with governance. But what about the
failure of your own democracies to rein in
corporations?’

World Bank/UNFCC/SIPRI

In the end, the government, with all its
failings, is all that Bangladeshis will have to
fall back on. Zakir Kibria, policy analyst with
national NGO Uttaran, believes organizations
should work towards building capacity at the
lowest tier of district official. ‘Alone, most NGOs
will fail,’ he says. ‘And I say that as an NGO.’

Bangladesh is bursting with expertise and
ideas. It’s like a tantalizing puzzle where you
can see all the parts but not how to fit them all
together.

The answer, Kibria says, has to be joined-up
working between government, civil society and
the scientific community. The latter urgently
need resources for climate modelling that can
pin down the shape and scale of the hazards
that lie ahead.

Making a virtue out of necessity

Bangladeshis are not natural pessimists.
Iftekhar Mahmud’s critical analysis did not
stop him from ending our conversation on a
positive note. ‘Our people are innovative, their
skill and motivation is high,’ he said. ‘That is
where hope lies.’

Saleemul Huq is another who ducks dire
predictions: ‘We are both vulnerable but also
better prepared than many others – at the
cutting edge of preparing for the impacts of
climate change.’

I am starting to wonder whether this
optimism is justified or a case of cognitive
dissonance. I think about the Netherlands
with their 100-year, costed climate adaptation
strategy, and the innovation that wealth brings;
their annual adaptation budget is $100 per
person compared to Bangladesh’s $0.26.

It seems to me that people like Shova and
Selina are resilient because they have to be.
Adaptation comes at the cost of great personal
sacrifice, degraded livelihoods and poor health.
Surviving is one thing; planning ahead is another.

Among the development community, a more
negative view prevails. ‘We are already in a bad basic situation regarding facilities and services.
We will be hit by more and more problems. If
we’re not ready, I fear terrible circumstances,’
worries Veena Khaleque, Practical Action’s
country manager.

No-one really knows if what is being done
now will be viable in 10 to 20 years’ time. My
mortality-bound brain struggles to summon up
even the 2050 world of scientists’ predictions.

But according to Kevin Anderson, deputy
director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate
Research, we may not have that long to wait.

Beyond adaptation

Anderson is an emissions expert who occupies
the cusp between politics and climate science.
He looks at energy systems, how power is
generated, how economies grow. And that’s
why when he says things are as bad as they
could possibly be, I’m inclined to believe him.

‘If you move scientists away from the
microphone they’ll agree that we are headed
for a four degree Celsius rise, maybe even by
2050. A lot of people have argued that four
degrees will trigger a move beyond where you
could have organized, structured adaptation.’
And that’s for everyone, by the way, not just
Bangladesh.

I ran Anderson’s projections past Fida Khan.
‘Four degrees by 2050? My God! Everything
will be destroyed,’ he exclaimed. ‘We are
adapting. But if there’s a dramatic change, then
it will be devastating.’

Coming back full circle, the best adaptation
then must be accelerated mitigation, deep cuts
in emissions. The real question becomes: are
we capable of changing our societies enough,
and in time, to stop it? I’d rather not wait to
find out if there’s a tipping point beyond which
society falls apart, when pushed beyond its
coping range.

Back at COA ST, Rezaul Chowdury is not
feeling hopeful. ‘I went to Bali, Cancún,
Copenhagen and Durban [UN climate talks].
I’m not frustrated, I’m completely demoralized.
It was a total waste of time. I should have stayed
on my islands. The conferences just generate
more cyclones, more floods, more people dead.

‘I feel like democracy is failing. I don’t
believe in armed struggle, I believe in dialogue.
Maybe this is my strength, maybe this is my
problem. I don’t know.’

So he passes back the baton: ‘You need to
wage a huge campaign in your country – a lot
of education. If you pressure your governments,
mitigation – and adaptation – will happen.
Otherwise not. And maybe it will take 50, 100
years. In the meantime, India is drying us up
with its dams and building fences while the world
submerges our country. We will die drowning.’

This article is from
the April 2012 issue
of New Internationalist.
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